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TripCart in the Blogosphere – excerpts from some popular independent blogs
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September 11, 2007
World's #1 social networking blog.
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TripCart’s Planning Maps Among the Most Useful
TripCart is a new trip planning tool, similar to TripTie, that lets you remix the trips of others, see on a map the various attractions within a given area, and easily incorporate nearly every aspect of a trip you can think of for creating your own personalized experience.
The best aspect of this site’s trip planning tools is the flow with which you can browse through a particular trip’s details. If you select to view a trip to Chicago, then you’ll see the attractions shown as icons on a map. An icon list of things to do appears beside the map, and you can click any of these to get a detailed map on a particular activity. From these activities you add to your map, TripCart offers a way for these to be incorporated into your itinerary, which is similar to TripHub’s group travel planning tools.
There are various tag clouds provided for you to see information about the region, other vacation ideas, things to do or things to see. The travel guide that TripCart provides lets you move through things like a guided tour, family vacation ideas, luxury vacation ideas and more. It also incorporates some wiki-functionality in that you’ll be able to add images to it. See flight and hotel deals, the reviews from other users, and also see what users have included this in their own trip plan. The trip plan of other users is broken down into a detailed itinerary with notes. You’re given the option to copy or print another user’s trip.
mashable.com/2007/09/11/tripcarts-planning-maps-among-the-most-useful/
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September 19, 2007
Web 2.0 news blog.
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Rooooooad Trip! With TripCart
TripCart is a nice new Web 2.0 beta for travelers who want to get out of the rut of planning trips and vacations around an airline schedule. What TripCart has done is create a site that captures the spirit of the road trip, adds in concrete ways to plan the trip and make arrangements and includes a forum for travelers to meet and compare notes, and in some cases plan trips together. It's social networking for the on-the-go set.
How is TripCart capturing the road trip vibe? They offer you the chance to plan a trip around a vague notion in your head. If you wake up on a Saturday morning with the kids and think "amusement park" when you look out the window at the gorgeous Summer day, you can log on to TripCart and search by attraction: "amusement park".
Do you want to go to an amusement park near your house, or do you want to go to a nearby state and make a weekend out of it?
Trip Cart even offers options for people who want to do something more vague than a specific attraction, like go "leaf peeping" and see the Fall foliage. Type that in and you get a tag cloud for leaf peepers, complete with pictures of possible destinations. One interesting thing about TripCart - unlike it's counterparts, it thinks outside the box a bit. Leaf peepers don't just get the standard "New England" destinations - you will also find recommended trips to Colorado and New Mexico, along with other places that aren't considered standard leaf peeping locales.
What about the people who prefer to travel in a more traditional way? TripCart has you covered also. If you look on the front page you see on the left a more traditional travel interface, grouped first by region and country, then narrowing down as you design your trip. On the right is the intuitive "road trip" destination model. Having them side by side is appealing and attractive.
As you explore the site, you notice that it offers you the chance to register as a member for free. This activates the feature where the site remembers you and your travel preferences and history, which is nice. Registration also gives you access to the forums. The forums are an interesting addition to a travel site. Allowing you to compare notes on various destinations, share advice and tips, and in some cases find a travel companion, the forums add a whole new dimension to the idea of booking travel online.
All in all I'd say TripCart is a fresh new outlook on travel.
profy.com/2007/09/19/tripcart/
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September 11, 2007
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Plan trips and find things to do with TripCart
For vacationers in the United States, time off is serious business. Most folks only get two weeks of playtime, and planning what to do and where to do it can be a serious pain. TripCart is a do-it-yourself trip-planning service that's a cross between Yelp and AAA's TripTik service. The site employs a mix of Google Maps, and local attraction ratings--user and editor generated--to let you browse and find interesting things to do. Instead of slurping in content from other services (similar to what Yahoo Local has done with Yelp), the reviews and ratings are site-specific.
The real killer application of TripCart is putting together your trip. Simply explore things you'd like to do on a list, or by browsing through them by genre on the map. To add them to your itinerary, just click the "add to trip" button. If you've logged in to the site, TripCart will keep track of your picks and let you edit and manage them in a separate section called "plan trip." Here, you can sort your picked items by item type or region, meaning that with one click you can figure out the best plan of attack for hitting each destination without zigzagging around town.
Best of all, there's a printable version that will take each of your entries in the order you chose and print them up with titles, addresses, and descriptions in both a summary and daily view. It's essentially a do-it-yourself guidebook.
You're also limited to the United States, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you're leaving the country. In the meantime, if you're looking for a well-designed and easy to use trip planner, TripCart is a really solid solution.
webware.com/8301-1_109-9776698-2.html
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September 19, 2007
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Plan your trips at TripCart
As the weather slowly shifts from summer to fall, many of us are left thinking about traveling south for some sun. With plenty of trip planning websites out there, TripCart focuses on combining all attractions into a single convenient location.
When the time to getaway rolls around, check in with TripCart. This travel website focuses on attractions that would be interesting to hit up when traveling in the U.S. Select a destination and TripCart pulls up Google Map with pinpoints of places to check out, including hotels, places of interest, theme parks, shopping, golf, sporting events, nature/parks, zoos and aquariums. It certainly takes the hassle out of visiting multiple locations for vacation planning.
Even more useful are the in depth descriptions of cities and the locations around where you are searching. Great if you have never been to the area before.
downloadsquad.com/2007/09/19/plan-your-trips-at-tripcart/
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October 8, 2007
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Plan Your Road Trip with Tripcart
Until recently, however, the Internet was really only an excellent tool to help you build the very basics of your travel itinerary. Flights, accommodation and car rental have been well catered for over the last few years. But what about when you actually arrive at your destination and you want to do something that doesn’t involve transport or sleeping?
This is where a new breed of services such as Tripcart come into play. Tripcart is a service that helps you plan your road trip within the USA. If you have ever been to the states for an extended period of time you will know its a big place and there are a whole bunch of choices when it comes to things to do, places to see, activities and the like. There are not many other places in the world where you can stay in one country whilst experiencing a true 'road trip’. Tripcart have obviously identified this and aim to help those of us who are keen to plan our USA road trip online.
Tripcart is definitely a site that I would categorise in the 'online travel 2.0' column. These guys are using classic 2.0 tactics such as Google Maps mashups, category clouds, reviews, ratings and other mandatory 2.0 style consumer generated content. This combination of site features and tactics are well executed on Tripcart making for a nice interface and therefore user experience.
As they say, "even the simple plans are hard to execute," and it must be easy for web 2.0 start-ups in the travel industry to fall into the trap of going global too quickly. The domestic travel market in the USA is huge so Tripcart will have more than enough work on their hands getting a great selection of local US inventory and content up on the site in the coming months and years. So yep, a smart move to stay local in my opinion.
rev2.org/2007/10/08/plan-your-road-trip-with-tripcart/
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